October 02, 2007

Blue Box Comment Line number changed - now +1-206-350-7280

Unfortunately, the comment line for the podcast has had to be changed. The new number is:

+1-206-350-7280

We use a free service from K7.net and unfortunately if no one calls the service for 30 days, they terminate your user account. You have no way to get back the phone number that you previously had (which, okay, it's a free service, so I can't complain!) and you have to register a new one. I keep using it primarily because it's simple... people call and leave a voicemail - and a WAV file shows up in our inbox. Simple. Easy.

But it does have this 30-day rule. Given that we've had a stretch between shows, there haven't been people calling in. Usually I call it once a month just to make sure that we keep the number... but I've been a bit distracted lately and forgot to do so. So we lost the number, which is too bad because the old one spelled out "blue" with the last 4 digits.

Somewhere in here I'm going to set up a local Asterisk server with an inbound phone number and at that point I'll move the comment line over to it and stop using K7.net. However, until that time, we've just got to make sure that someone leaves an audio comment at least once a month!

(Disappointing that this happened just as I announced the call-in contest for the book for our anniversary show...)

Full Disclosure

Jonathan Zar is affiliated with Pingalo and is the Secretary of VOIPSA and member of the Board of Directors.

This is a personal project and neither the Internet Society, Pingalo nor VOIPSA have any formal connection to this podcast. In the interest of transparency we just thought you should know our affiliations.

Why "Blue Box"?

We chose the name "Blue Box" primarily as a nod to the era of phone phreaking in part to illustrate that threats to telephony are not new - they just continue to change and evolve. That and admittedly the name just sounded cool.